Professional Beta Readers: What to Expect — Guest: CeCe Downs
If the usual beta-reading exchange doesn’t work for us, would a professional professional beta reader be good? What should we look for?
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How Is Our Protagonist Challenged to Improve? (& a Worksheet!)
In our story, something makes our protagonist change and progress in their internal journey. But what’s that something? What triggers them to grow?
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Watching Out for Redundancy in Our Story
Let’s say this only once: Repetition and redundancy in our writing is a problem, but we can learn how to avoid the issue.
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Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 5 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
Once we know what our character’s backstory makes them think they could never do, we know how to show their path of change and growth over the story.
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Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 4 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
A character’s backstory reveals what they thought they could never do, which gives us ideas for our plot and making them face their fears.
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Building a Story: Chapters vs. Scenes
There’s no wrong way to get to “The End” when drafting our book. That includes how some think about chapters as they write and some think about scenes.
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Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 3 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
A character’s backstory can be mined to add more emotion to our stories, such as by layering how their backstory’s defining moment affected them.
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How Can We Make Our Story’s Conflict Stronger?
It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about the obstacles preventing change.
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Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 2 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
A character’s false belief is central to a story’s internal arc, and the defining moment in a character’s backstory is key to creating that false belief.
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Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 1 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
Backstory helps readers connect to our characters and provides context for their actions, but how can we make it compelling and avoid boring information dumps?
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